Cuts in technology may put Concordia students at disadvantage

At Concordia R-2 School District, and many others throughout the country, children's access to the latest technology has become a necessity, while funding has turned into a luxury. Without the latest and greatest equipment, Superintendent Mary Beth Scherer and Technology Coordinator Karen Hemme are afraid students may not be able to stand out in a tough job market.

"They're going to be competing with 15 or 20 people for that position so whatever we can provide them with here that will give them that edge, that's what we want to do," Scherer said.

Hemme agreed and said although most career fields have a training process, if a student can go into the work environment with a working knowledge-base, the more successful they will be.

"It very well could put them at a disadvantage because they're not used to using the new software that's out there... I realize each business will do its own training session, but if they can walk in and actually have a clue about how to work with this stuff, it's going to be much better for them," Hemme said.

One example of this, she explained, is in agriculture where certain programs are being used for landscaping. If a student does not have knowledge of the most current landscaping software, they are less likely to be chosen from the job-seekers pool, which continues to grow.

The reality of Concordia School District's technology department is that the computers are getting older and the funds to replace them are slowly disappearing. And as computers get older, so do the programs they can comfortably run, and often times the computers are too slow for the programs to be updated.

"We have some teachers who have educational games they use on the computers. [The games] require a certain amount of memory and some of our teachers have older computers," Hemme said. "One is called 'Me and my mom.' You can put [the program] on [the computer] and [the students] learn to use the mouse. That can operate on a slower computer, which is fine. But now, the software comes out and you have to have better computers."

Better computers are not something that Scherer said she sees in the near future, and have not been budgeted into the 2010-2011 school year. In the past, the school district replaced computers on a three-to five-year cycle, with roughly 30 being replaced each year, older ones first.

"We would have to go through and assess the computers in the classroom and see which ones are the slowest, which ones aren't handling well, which ones aren't doing what it is they need to do," Hemme said.

This is the first year, she said, not even the oldest computers will be replaced. Last year, the school district wasn't able to replace older computers with new counterparts except for what the high school business teacher, Kathy Knipmeyer, was able to hand down after receiving new equipment from a vocational grant.

"[Knipmeyer] got the vocational business grant last year, so the 25 [computers] in her room went out," Scherer said. "We can take those that were in her class and spread them throughout the district. So she gets the really new cutting-edge stuff, and we get the stuff that's two or three years old."

Knipmeyer usually writes a grant every three years, but Hemme explained technology grants are scarce and will be even harder to receive in the current economic situation. The grants the school does receive are geared toward the business program specifically, which allows for Knipmeyer to purchase equipment that matches what students may see when they enter college or a career.

"We've done a really good job of keeping our business lab updated so the kids who are going through those programs are using what businesses are using," Scherer said. Especially since, in an economic downturn, businesses aren't updating their equipment either.

The scariest part of the technology budget crunch for Scherer and Hemme is the lack of IT professionals within the district. Hemme said she is qualified to handle certain issues but the ones that arise have her on the phone for long periods of time figuring out what went wrong.

"Although I do technology and I have my education in technology, I certainly don't know how to make the firewalls work...They're usually not repetitive problems either. It could be the firewall this time, and the back-up tapes or power surge the next time," Hemme said. "And I'm teaching too... Somebody's Internet goes down, they call me and I have to say 'I'm in the middle of class right now, you'll have to wait.' I don't like doing that because I know it's for an educational purpose."

Although this situation is hard on Hemme, and often the district, according to Scherer it was a necessity to save staff positions. IT services at the district are contracted out, and by cutting their time in-district from three days a week to two days a week, the district saved $11,000.

This was a hefty savings but did not make up for the increase in Internet services, which was once strongly supported by state funds, and jumped from costing the district $2,000- $4,000 a year to $11,000 for the 2010-2011 school year.

The good thing about a tight budget, Scherer said, is "you learn to get creative." For instance, the high school field trip budget has been cut, but thanks to the Educational Technology classroom -- the ITV room and the latest interactive and virtual educational technology, the students will get to go places most wouldn't get a chance to go.

"Some of the high school field trips may not happen, so instead of paying for a bus to take the kids out of school on a field trip, we can spend an hour in the ITV room and travel to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," Hemme said. "Elementary students went to Florida to a marine biology place, and they got to look at sharks... and then a camera went inside the shark tank."

With the current generation of students growing up on television and used to learning from technology, these "virtual field trips" can be almost as good as the real thing, Hemme said. The ITV room also allows high school upperclassmen to attend college classes in Warrensburg, Sedalia and Fayette.

"We have seniors graduating that have already completed their freshman year of college," Scherer said.

Scherer doesn't know what the future holds for Concordia's technology department, but does know the district will uphold the standards of sending graduating seniors out with as much real-world experience as possible. And she keeps in mind that everyone -- schools and businesses -- are in the same economic boat.

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